US company spacecraft reaches lunar orbit for landing attempt

One lunar landing module built by Intuitive Machines, a company based in Houston, reached the orbit of the Moon this Wednesday (21) for the first landing attempt of the United States in Earth's closest celestial neighbor in over 50 years and the first ever carried out by a private spacecraft.

The six-legged Nova-C lander, named Odysseus entered a circular orbit 92 km above the lunar surface after firing its main thruster rocket for nearly seven minutes in an orbital insertion maneuver, the company said in an online statement.

If everything goes according to plan, the spacecraft should gradually lower its orbit within the next 24 hours and land in Malapert A crater near the south pole of the Moon, at 7:49 pm (Brasília time) on Thursday, carrying a set of scientific instruments and technology demonstrations from NASA.

Odysseus remains “in excellent health,” the company said, adding that for the duration of its lunar orbit, about 240,000 miles (384,000 km) from Earth, mission controllers in Houston will monitor the spacecraft's flight data and transmit images of the Moon.

Odysseus was launched six days ago, on February 15, on a Falcon 9 rocket built and flown by SpaceX, Elon Musk's company based in California, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

If the landing is successful, the IM-1 mission will represent the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a US spacecraft since Apollo 17, when NASA's last manned lunar mission, with Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, touched down there in 1972.

It would also mark the first “soft landing” on the Moon by a commercially manufactured and operated vehicle and the first of NASA's Artemis lunar program, as the US races to get astronauts back to Earth's natural satellite before China lands its own. manned spacecraft there.